Self-Chaotic Microlasers for Optical Time Domain Reflectometry Using Bit Quantization Method

Chaos correlation optical time domain reflectometry (OTDR), which has the advantage of no trade-off between resolution and dynamic range compared with conventional OTDR, can be used for fiber fault detection. This paper proposes a bit-quantization method for OTDR by quantizing the time-domain signal collected by the oscilloscope into a bit-signal amplitude. The experimental results show that the spatial resolution of quantized data of different bits is not degraded, and the dynamic range is only slightly reduced by comparing the cross-correlation functions (CCF) calculated based on experimental data and bit data. The OTDR spatial resolution of 1-bit data is 3 cm, and the dynamic range is reduced by less than 1 dB compared to conventional OTDR. It theoretically validates the feasibility of using simple sampling devices such as 1-bit data samplers for OTDR in the future without significantly degrading OTDR performance.